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More beauty product nonsense

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Created on Wednesday, 31 August 2016 14:06

Have you ever bought a skin-care product after/despite hearing some impressive-sounding gobbledygook? The beauty product industry has seemingly always used hefty doses of waffle when marketing its creams, oils and ‘exfoliating’ gels.

But how many of the claims made about said products bear scrutiny? Unsurprisingly, very few.

This issue rears its wrinkled, badly-moisturised head every so often. This time, it’s due to a supporter asking us about the use of the word ‘redensified’ in a current skin-moisturising product marketing campaign. What, they asked us, does it mean, if anything?

Well, the word doesn’t appear to be in any dictionary, online or otherwise. The first use of it we can find relates to Indian city planning in the 1970s. By the early 2000s, the cosmetics industry decided, for whatever reason, they liked the sound of it. One ad campaign featured Diane Keaton urging anyone interested in ‘redensifying’ their skin to hand over their money. But there’s no such word, and no such product feature. The claims made on behalf of 'redensifying' are often ridiculous.

As with other similar nonsensical claims, it’s a con. Just as you can’t ‘replenish and repair damaged hair’ (hair is dead – you can make it shine but you can’t repair it), you can’t ‘redensify’ your skin, or anything else. Nor need you spend too much money ‘exfoliating’ it (getting rid of the dead top-layer of skin) – a quick scrub with a rough sponge will do the job.

If you’re really keen on ‘redensifying’, you might want to put money you were about to spend on falsely-marketed creams back in your wallet.

For a bit of fun, here are a couple of recent beauty product descriptions. Of course, it’s a competitive market, and the desperation to be different and more appealing is understandable. But the vast majority of the text in both adverts is nonsense, overwritten, irrelevant or all three. Enjoy.

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